Zero Hate Policy

Where hate starts

Hate gets described as a feeling. It isn't. It's a practice: treating a group of people as less than human, systematically, and then building normal life on top of that treatment.

The practice doesn't need symbols or slogans. Some of it wears lanyards and cites policy. A board deciding who gets care, an office drafting rules that split families, an institution filing away a class of children as unworthy of their own history — same practice, better paperwork.

So the test I use is about conduct, not costume. Who the target is doesn't matter. How respectable the perpetrators look doesn't matter. If a person, company, or government runs on dehumanizing people and calls it procedure, it's on the wrong side of the line.

Where this comes from

I'm a New Zealand adoptee. For most of a century, my country's government classified children like me as unfit to know where we came from. Over a hundred thousand of us grew up with our records sealed — family, genealogy, medical history — by an act of parliament that everyone involved considered perfectly reasonable.

Nobody in that system thought they were doing harm. They had forms. They had process. They had the calm confidence of people whose cruelty never has to announce itself.

That's my reference point. When someone tells me a dehumanizing arrangement is just how things work, I've seen how things work. I don't accept the framing, and I don't build on top of it.

What the policy does

A policy that never meets a decision is decoration. Mine gets used in three places:

• Who I work with. Before any significant engagement, I look at the people and the organization — their associations, their money, their record. If the trail leads to systematic dehumanization, the engagement ends before it starts.
• What I recommend. Tools and vendors get the same check. A product doesn't get a pass because it's well built. When a vendor fails this standard, the review on this site says so in a warning you can't miss.
• What I let stand. In rooms I'm part of, dehumanizing talk gets answered out loud. Staying quiet is a way of helping.

Why your business should care

Every AI decision you make is a trust decision. You're handing a vendor your customer data, your phone lines, your internal writing — and borrowing its judgment on where all of that goes. If that vendor's conduct can't survive daylight, neither can your decision to use it. Regulated businesses learn this first.

That's why the zero-hate policy and this site's reviews are one system, not two. The reviews apply the standard; the standard keeps the reviews honest. When I recommend a tool, you're getting work from someone with no vendor money in the answer and a documented reason for every call — including the calls that cost me relationships to make.

What it takes out of my pocket

This policy has real overhead. Work I could take, I don't. Doors that used to open, don't. I treat that as the price of being able to look at everything I've built and vouch for all of it.

If that trade sounds wrong to you, we'll both find out early — and it will have cost both of us very little.